Youth Culture, Higher Ed, Flappers: Origins of Youth Culture in the 1920s

To understand the origins of youth and youth culture in the 1920s, we have to look at the extension of schooling: the development of high schools and universities as public institutions which not only serve the elite and privileged but also the masses of youth in the middle class and the working class. We see the importance of extended schooling in terms of its effect of bringing young people who are all the same age together in the same space, in the development of “peer culture.” The young people don’t have to work or build a career yet, and they are young so they want to have fun, be entertained, also find their identity, express themselves at the same time that they want to be part of the group and “fit in.” And some of them—not all but a lot of them—are also young and want to experiment with their sexuality, and find some means of getting intoxicated through alcohol/drugs.

Two peer cultures which developed and expanded during the 1920s. The first is the greek system of fraternities and sororities which expanded as the universities and high schools expanded in the 1920s, along with college football and sports and a series of fads and fashions which involved how one could dress “collegiate,” master the “collegiate look.” The second peer culture involves the culture which developed outside of school, at night on weekends and in movie houses and jazz clubs and places of amusement. It is here that we see changes in attitudes about sexuality and gender roles, the emergence of the “dating” system and increasing rates of premarital intercourse, a series of changes which had their most profound effects on young women. One indication of those changes is the emergence of a subculture of “flappers,” which we see as a sign, symbol of the changes taking place with respect to young women, sexuality, and gender. The flappers were based in the jazz clubs during Prohibition, and they also represent important developments in race and its relationship to music made by African-Americans.

These youth cultures which developed during the 1920s were eventually stifled by the events that followed, the Great Depression and WWII. Young people no longer able to insulate themselves from work and responsibility, they had to “grow up fast” while looking for a job or fighting a war. Not until the 1950s would young people and youth culture be as visible in American culture, and by that time it would be continuous but also bigger than ever.  

Many high schools and universities were founded during the 18^th and 19^th centuries across U.S, but they mostly serviced the elite. Private colleges in particular were places where rich went to become “refined,” how to do things like learn Latin, which has no practical application in the real world but is a way of showing privilege. They went to college for religious study. Colleges were private, expensive, but most of all you had to have the privilege of not needing to work to help your family. In the year 1900, only 1 of 9 of 14-17 year-olds were in high school, and much fewer in college. The vast majority of teenagers worked on farms to support their family or maybe even feed their own family, or they worked in a factory or somewhere else because the family needed their earnings.

Enrollments in high school and college began to rise steadily in late 19^th and early 20^th century, but 1920 was biggest period of growth. In 1920, there were 2.2 million HS students, but by 1930 that number had nearly doubled to 4.3 million HS students. In 1920, 28% of American youth had attended at least some high school; by 1930 it was 47%. Colleges also saw their enrollments triple within a 30 year span, from 1900 to 1930. By 1930, 20% of people in late teens and early twenties were in college. College was still relatively exclusive to the middle class and some segments of white working class, while far fewer numbers of blacks and racial minorities were attending. Actually more women (slightly) than men enrolled, because men’s labor was more likely to be valuable. 

Why this growth in college enrollment? The 1920s saw a tremendous expansion of middle class, which had been growing for some time but accelerated its growth in the 1920s. The new middle classes were based on “white-collar” jobs, jobs not in manual labor but insurance, sales, management, engineering, or the professions. This sector of the American population experienced much prosperity throughout the 1920s, as wages and incomes increased steadily, the stock market prospered, and the consumer economy flourished as people had more money to spend. The new middle class was based on white collar jobs in corporations, based not on physical skill, but rather on information, knowledge, organization, leadership, services, decision-making, or in other words mental and social skills. Corporations wanted people with more training in intellectual skills, with more years of schooling. In turn, people in the middle classes and the working classes who wanted their children to have a better future for themselves saw that schooling was the path to upward mobility, the best and maybe the only way of moving into a white collar or professional career. So if families could at all afford to send their child to high school and college,  if they didn’t need their child to work to help support the family, they would send them to school in hopes that it would give them more opportunities for the future.

One crucial consequence of the extension of schooling is not only that it allowed more people to reach or at least aspire to middle class life, but also that it brought people the same age together in one space. It created the conditions for a “peer culture” by concentrating them in school. At school, young people were away from their family (maybe even living at school), they were surrounded by people their own age, and they were relatively autonomous from institutional authority. All schools certainly had and still have an elaborate number of rules and regulations and disciplinary measures and rules of conduct and dress and authorities (teachers, deans, etc.) who are in charge of watching over young people. But they are less stringent than in something like the military, where young people are concentrated together but have absolutely no freedom to act on their own, and this is why sociologists call the military a “total institution,” as opposed to high schools and colleges. 

The first “peer culture” in relation to school. These were mostly school clubs based on extra-curricular activities. High schools and colleges saw students become involved in after-school dances, drama clubs, glee clubs and choruses, as well as participation in student government and student newspapers, and all kinds of different religious and ethnic organizations. These student groups tended to act as a bridge between family and adulthood for young people, providing them with emotional support and friendship and security among their peers and thus easing the removal from one’s family, while at the same time giving young people opportunities to make their decisions, work together as a group, and participate in ways that they couldn’t do in the classroom.

The most important and central of these school-based peer cultures was the greek system of fraternities and sororities, which were closely connected to school athletics and team sports, the most popular of which was football. Again, fraternities and sororities had been around long before the 1920s, on both HS and college campuses, but the 1920s was when they experienced an extraordinary growth as enrollments increased. The number of fraternity chapters increased from 1,500 in 1912 to 4,000 in 1930. The number of fraternity houses increased from 750 in 1920 to 2,000 in 1930. By 1930, 35% of college students were in fraternities and sororities. 

Greeks were thus a minority, but on many campuses they became a very powerful and influential one. At most schools they dominated student government and, by extension, student newspapers. In fact, most elections were simply choices between different fraternities and sororities. As they received more alumni donations and build more houses around campus, they also began to wield considerable financial and political power. By 1929 the estimated value of all greek-owned property was said to be $90 million.

But the place where Greeks probably exercised the most power and influence was over the social scene, the peer culture of young people on campus. Fraternities and sororities built their reputation based on having the most popular, the most important, the most attractive, people. As enrollments and pledges increased, the Greeks could afford to be more and more selective, and their reputation in fact hinged on being the most exclusive, the most selective. Because of their power in student government and newspapers, they could increase their own status and prestige by electing their people to positions of power or writing articles in the school paper about the “big man on campus.” 

The most important way that frats and sororities enhanced their prestige and status on campus was through linking themselves to college football. The 1920s saw an explosion in interest and popularity in football at the college and high school levels. Football was popular because it resolved people’s anxieties about masculinity in the 1920s: young men were no longer fighting at war, nor were they working in factories or farms, but instead they were in school, an activity that at the time had feminizing connotations. So people were basically afraid that little Johnny would go off to school and come back a pansy, and football helped eased those anxieties because it was so masculine and violent, a sport that most closely approximated warfare. Football also helped galvanize people’s sense of “school of spirit,” their sense of belonging to something larger than themselves, being part of the glory of their institution. When the team won, they won. During the 1920s students would often travel with the football team for games at other campuses, taking a “road trip” from Ann Arbor to Evanston to see Michigan play Northwestern, for example. Attendance for college football increased dramatically, as much as 100,000 per game, and universities began to build mammoth stadiums for their football teams.

Fraternities and sororities latched on to the power and popularity of college football during the 1920s. They aggressively recruited the best and most attractive players and cheerleaders among themselves. When people on campus thought of a particular fraternity or sorority, they often associated it with an individual player or cheerleader.

Because they were seen as powerful, because they had a reputation, status, and prestige, most students invariably wanted to be part of the Greek system. Most students had been sent to college in order to become “successful,” and fraternities and sororities were the most immediate symbols of success. Sometimes the benefits of belonging were economic, because of the connections that alumni might have with business or government. But the Greek system was also crucial for things like the dating scene, where one’s attractiveness and desirabilitiy of course resided in which fraternity or sorority one belonged to. If you needed a date for the big dance and didn’t belong to a reputable house, you were probably out of luck.

 Because enrollments were increasing rapidly and because so many of those new students wanted to be part of the Greek system, and because the fraternities and sororities based their reputation on being selective and exclusive, the campus peer culture of the 1920s was extremely conformist and hierarchical. If you wanted in, you had to talk the same, dress the same, act the same, and share the same values, ideas, and attitudes as your peers. If you were too weird, if you didn’t show enough “school spirit,” if you had too many intellectual interests and not enough extra-curricular ones (not to mention if you were not attractive, or Jewish, or black), you could be easily discarded and left out. 

This pressure to fit in and keep up with one’s peers became even more intense during the 1920s with the introduction of “fads” and various “collegiate” fashions. Now students not only had to keep up with their peers but also stay informed about the newest fashion, the latest dance craze, and so on. College newspapers circulated reports about what the students at Yale or Harvard were wearing. Advertisers began to target college students because their numbers were becoming larger and they had money to spend. Advertisers could exploit young people’s anxieties about “fitting in” with the crowd, asking Didn’t you know everyone who’s anyone is using X? Wearing Y? Movies and magazines, the newest media of the 1920s, also helped circulate images of what the young and successful were doing and wearing. In short, this peer culture on campus was based on a precarious balance of conforming to group expectations and competing to be the newest, the hippest, the most modern. 

A second form of youth culture became highly visible during the 1920s, and this one developed outside of school. This doesn’t mean that high school and college students didn‘t go out to nightclubs, to dance and listen to jazz music, to drink and mingle with the opposite sex, etc. because they did—middle class students were an important part of this youth culture also. But this second youth culture also involved a lot of young people who weren’t students, working-class youth who were the children of immigrants, who lived in cities but didn’t go to school and had to work in their teenage years. 

The late 19^th and early 20^th centuries were an important period of change for young people, even if they didn’t have the opportunity to go to school. This was the period of industrialization, and the demand for labor drew many families to migrate to the American cities, either from rural America or somewhere outside the US altogether. The children of these families grew up in cities with no memory of rural life, they grew up American even if their parents were immigrants. Those who went to work, especially young women, often experienced a sense of independence, because they at least could get out of their family’s house and sometimes they got to keep a part of what they earned to spend on themselves. At the beginning of the 20^th century young people did have a growing number of choices in entertainment themselves and spend their money, from movie theaters to department stores to dance halls to amusement parks like Coney Island in New York. Young people might also associate in community centers, neighborhood facilities and clubs, like the YMCA. For young women in particular, these spaces of amusement not only provided the opportunity for entertainment but also gave them a means to get out of the house, hang out with their girlfriends, or possibly spend time alone with a boy.

The system of dating, going on dates, as we know it, emerged during the 1920s among young people. Previously, courtship had been strictly chaperoned: young people could go out with the opposite sex, but they had to bring an adult or be subjected to adult approval. The date was different because it was relatively unsupervised. The availability of the automobile was crucial to this freedom, as the date involved going out somewhere, and the automobile might also be the place where the couple ended up if things got serious. Sometime in between, the couple had to have somewhere to go, and dance halls and amusement halls were certainly popular, but the most popular destination was the movie theater. Going to the movies, after all, not only meant going out but also sitting alone in a dark theater. 

The movie theater became an important destination for young people—during the 1920s it was reported that most young people went to the movies about once a week. In turn, the  movie industry began to target young people as a crucial audience and source of profit. Moviemakers tried to capitalize on the interest of their youthful audiences with movies about people their age: in the early 20s, there were several movies with “youth” in their title produced every year, such as Reckless Youth, Flaming Youth, The Heart of Youth, The Soul of Youth, The Price of Youth, The Madness of Youth, Youth Must Have Love, Sporting Youth, Pampered Youth, Cheating Youth, and finally, Too Much Youth. The movies themselves also became an important means of advertising to young people, particularly to young women, as fans became interested in what cosmetics movie stars used, what clothes they wore, what hairstyles they sported, and so on. 

More generally, the movies provided a perfect advertisement for a life of leisure and consumption, for a liberalization of sexual mores, for an image of the “good life” as it appeared to be personified by youth during the “Roaring Twenties.” This image of the Roaring Twenties was captured by the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote about an age when young people ruled the scene, when everyone wanted to get in on the good life and share in prosperity and consumerism, when people wanted to know what young people were up to so that they too could be hip to the newest, most modern styles, when youth themselves were confident, carefree, and turned their backs on adult authorities and traditions. So the image of youthfulness, especially in the movies, was closely connected to the prosperity and consumerism of the Roaring Twenties, and to the way in which the new consumer culture accelerated the rate of change in society and broke down the repressiveness of the Victorian Era.  

Indeed, during the 1920s, attitudes about sex, family, work, and gender were all changing, and young women of all class backgrounds were leading the change. Surveys reveal that young women were losing their virginity at an earlier age, that more young women were having sex before marriage, and that most of them did not think of sex as a “sin.” Various magazines began to report about the practice of “petting” among young people on dates. People became more receptive to the idea of sex education and information about contraception, and people of all ages were less likely to view divorce as a source of shame and stigma. The media tended to inflate and exaggerate the changes in sexual mores and behavior to create a sense of moral hysteria, but the fact is that attitudes had really changed.

The flapper became the symbol of these new freedoms granted to young women and the liberalization of attitudes about sex. The word flapper was brought home by American soldiers after World War I who used it to describe European women who were supposedly looser and more “easy.” The flappers were both a real subculture of young women and a figment of media sensationalism about sex, girls, and morality. In other words, they are the first of many American subcultures—like juvenile delinquents, beats, hippies, and punks—which have some basis in reality, and then are hyped up in the media, which causes more young people to want to be a part of them because the media gives the subculture a reputation for being bad, rebellious, etc. 

The flapper look and style was characterized by bobbed hair, short skirts, silk stockings, and heavy cosmetics. It was a conscious turn away from the image of femininity in the Victorian era, when girls were made to look like flowers, with frilly dresses and long hair. The flapper look was more aggressively sexual, but the short hair and slimming fashions also gave it an androgynous appearance. The flapper style became synonymous with the modern look, with the style which moved away from traditional styles of fragile femininity. The behavior of flappers also suggested a breaking with tradition in regard to gender norms: flappers got attention because they smoked and drank in public (these were big no no’s), because they danced with men in dance halls, and because they had a reputation for going all the way before marriage.

The place where flappers could be found was in nightclubs, dancing to jazz music, leading a series of dance crazes like the turkey trot, the bunny hug, “shaking the shimmy.” Beginning in the year 1920, the US passed Prohibition, outlawing alcohol. Imagine the situation: a new generation of youth who is off to college, who have cars and want to have some fun, and yet alcohol is illegal. This didn’t stop young people from going out to drink and dance, just that they had to go to illegal establishment called the speakeasy. Prohibition inadvertanately led young white people to seek out places where jazz music was being played by black musicians in predominantly black areas of the city, such as Harlem. They found that the jazz music was exciting, rebellious, and dangerous, and the illegality and racial integration of the establishment enhanced that sense of danger and rebellion. 

Dancing to jazz music and going to speakeasies became immensely popular not only with flappers but with all kinds of young people who were looking for a good time and a chance to rebel. This touched off a moral panic among adult authorities, who were predictably troubled by the sexuality of youthful dancing, especially within a racially integrated establishment. In the early twenties, the Ladies Home Journal warned its readers that young people were being morally corrupted as they danced along to "the abominable jazz orchestra with its voodoo-born minors and its direct appeal to the sensory center." Notice the blatant racism in this warning—the description of music made by blacks as “voodoo music,” the assumption that black music is primitive, sensual, can somehow inflitrate the body and make it “wriggle.” This was of course the main fear of white America about jazz, dancing, and speakeasies: that black music might corrupt young girls by appealing to their sensuality, that on an intergrated dance floor young white girls might “wriggle their torso” with young black boys. This is a common formula for moral panic, which we will see repeated in the 1950s with regard to rock ‘n’ roll: it is basically the fear that comes when young white kids listen to black music.

You might also notice that the young people themselves also found music and dancing to be exciting and rebellious because they mostly shared their parents’ racist assumptions. The parents thought that the music and dancing was primitive, sensual, and exotic and that this was a bad thing. The kids also thought the jazz scene and its people were primitive, sensual, and exotic, but this was exactly what they wanted. In other words, they shared their parents’ assumptions, but reached different conclusions. They wanted to rebel or escape from civilized, so they latched on to a people and a music which they assumed to be uncivilized, primitive and exotic. This established a pattern of white appropriation of black music which we will see repeated at several different points during the twentieth century. 

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